It’s after eight by the time we’re done. He suggests dinner. I demur. I can’t. I can’t sit across from another guy—even a client—and share a meal. I’m not ready.
I part company with him and catch the bus home, so tired I feel like I could sleep for a week. I read somewhere that exhaustion is a part of heartbreak. It’s the body’s way of putting you into a kind of semicomatose state until you’ve had time to heal, and that absolutely feels like what’s happening with me.
I feel that. I feel completely drained of enthusiasm.
Ordinarily, I’d celebrate a night like tonight, but I just don’t have it in me.
I’m asleep within ten minutes.
The photo is the first thing I think of the next morning, and it’s with renewed irritation. Hurt. Annoyance. He’s here, in Australia, at the golf course I sold him, and he hasn’t got in touch. Is there a clearer way to show me that he doesn’t want a bar of me?
That he doesn’t want me?
I mean, I get it.
It’s obvious. But it still hurts like hell.
* * *
The sunrise is spectacular.
I stare at it as the colours infiltrate the horizon, as pink bleeds into black and the stars twinkle and fade, dipping behind the ocean. There’s a boat on the water, a trawler, far out, and even though it’s a fishing ship it makes me think of the scuba cruise we did. It makes me think of her.
Grace.
She’s everywhere here. Her name’s on the breeze, tormenting me, scratching over my body, whipping me with remembered pleasure.
Grace is the air I breathe, the sky I see, the tightness in my body—a tightness that speaks of a longing for which I have no words.
And suddenly, staring out at the water we swam in, the ocean we looked on together, I can’t not see her.
I can’t be here, in Australia, so close—just a few hours from her, and not... I don’t know.
It’s selfish. Selfish as all fuck. And stupid, too, because it’s been more than a month and maybe she’s over me, maybe she’s forgotten all about me.
The idea of that is like a knife in my gut.
Fuck.
I grab my wallet and head to the door, calling my assistant as I go, asking her to get the jet readied. It’s only as the cab speeds towards the airport that I remember Theo.
Heading to Sydney for the day.
I send the text then switch my phone off. I don’t want him to call. I don’t want him to ask me why. I’m not ready to discuss it. I think I’m one sane conversation away from being talked out of this stupidity.
Or maybe he wouldn’t even try. Maybe he’d chew me out for having left in the first place. I drag a hand through my hair, watching the scenery change outside my window.
The plane’s ready when I arrive. I stride onto it, impatient now to see her. Grace is everywhere here, too.
I go into the conference room on autopilot, and see her as she was that first morning, sitting there telling me she’d need guidelines, that if we were going to keep sleeping together it would need to be on her terms.
From the beginning she knew there was danger here, and still she went with it. She was brave, right to the end.
‘I fell in love with you, Jagger. I fell head over heels in love with you, somewhere in these last few days... Don’t kid yourself that we’re just two people who’ve been sleeping together.’
I hurt her.
I hurt her so badly.